Covering the whole development process for the global biotechnology industry

Bioprocessing begins upstream, most often with culturing of animal or microbial cells in a range of vessel types (such as bags or stirred tanks) using different controlled feeding, aerating, and process strategies.

Beginning with harvest of material from a bioreactor, downstream processing removes or reduces contaminants to acceptable levels through several steps that typically include centrifugation, filtration, and/or chromatographic technologies.

Drug products combine active pharmaceutical ingredients with excipients in a final formulation for delivery to patients in liquid or lyophilized (freeze-dried) packaged forms — with the latter requiring reconstitution in the clinical setting.

Many technologies are used to characterize biological products, manufacturing processes, and raw materials. The number of options and applications is growing every day — with quality by design (QbD) giving impetus to this expansion.

Even as it matures, the biopharmaceutical industry is still a highly entrepreneurial one. Partnerships of many kinds — from outsourcing to licensing agreements to consultancies — help companies navigate this increasingly global business environment.

Wednesday, September 19, 2018 Daily Archives

Cell line development engineers in the biopharmaceutical industry juggle several, sometimes contradictory priorities. They must present their bioprocessing colleagues with a master cell line that can express a reproducibly high-quality protein product at titers and growth concentrations that will be high enough for manufacturing efficiency — and without those parameters degrading over time. Performing the first step in every bioprocess, these scientists must consider their own budgetary concerns and efficiencies while facing regulatory scrutiny under the 21st-century risk-management paradigm. In…

Health authorities are requesting substantial details from sponsors regarding practices used to generate production cell lines for recombinant DNA–(rDNA) derived biopharmaceuticals. Authorities also are asking for information about the clonality of master cell banks (MCBs) and control strategies to minimize genetic heterogeneity. Such requests are prompted by recent reports indicating “nonclonality” for certain production cell lines. To address these and related issues, the CASSS CMC Strategy Forum on “Production Cell Line Development and Control of Product Consistency During Cell Cultivation:…

Sales of monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) are predicted to be over US$125 billion by 2020 (1). Such revenue potential puts significant pressure on the biopharmaceutical industry to reduce timelines, especially to first-in-human trials. Cell-line development represents a large and critical portion of the early development timeline. Whether a developer is using random or targeted integration for introducing genes into a host-cell genome, the regulatory requirement for addressing monoclonality introduces a time and resource-intensive step in this process. Many different techniques are…

Many early-phase acquisitions do not make sense for shareholders despite having promising assets, says Lilly’s CFO Joshua Smiley. About a third of Lilly’s pipeline comes from M&A. Speaking to attendees at the Morgan Stanley Healthcare Conference Broker Conference Call this month, Eli Lilly CFO Joshua Smiley said his firm is “interested in doing early stage clinical deals where we see compelling scientific rationale in our key therapeutic areas and that we can upgrade our pipeline.” But deals also need to…